


Halfway

by Mierke



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-13
Updated: 2015-10-13
Packaged: 2018-04-26 04:52:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,330
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4990975
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mierke/pseuds/Mierke
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hermione joins the Bureau and is a little surprised when she is assigned to trail along with Loony Lovegood (a.k.a. Hermione/Luna, X-Files style).</p>
            </blockquote>





	Halfway

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bastet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bastet/gifts).



Hermione took the stairs to the basement one by one, with an utter slowness that belied her unwillingness to actually go where she was going. She was still a bit shaken from the assignment she had just gotten. With the way her job interview had been going, she probably should have seen it coming, but she hadn’t.

She tried to shake it off, but the questions were still battering at her head. 

"We see you took a year off between year six and seven of Hogwarts? Why was this? Don't people usually just follow the seven years in one go?"

"There seems to be a gap between your final year of schooling and your first year of Auror training? What did you do?"

The people in America had hardly heard of the Second Britain Wizarding War, and if they had, the only names that had made it across the Pond were Harry Potter and Voldemort. Of course, this had been the reason why she had left Britain, but it still made her really angry that nobody had been willing to believe that she had actually been a part of the war. Just the look on their faces as she had told them she had been at Harry's side... They hadn't even been willing to believe Harry had still been in school.

So now she was stuck with this job, this lowest of the low, literally even, as she descended towards the basement. Oh, they had made it out to be important, had made it out as if they needed someone capable to be a scientific counterpart to whomever it was downstairs who they had absolutely no faith in, but no matter what they had seemed to think, Hermione wasn't stupid. This was a job they weren't willing to waste any of their actual good agents on, and so they sent the new kid.

With a sigh she knocked on the door, then straightened her posture. If this was to be her fate, she would make the most of it. Hermione Granger did nothing halfway.

* * *

The first time Hermione was confronted with near perfect proof of the existence of Nargles, she wasn't sure what to put in her report. She could hardly let the girl who was blamed for all the thefts take the fall, but her job was to make sure every report was scientifically sound. Her descriptions needed to fit the world as it was known, needed to adhere to the rules as they were taught.

Hermione Granger did nothing halfway, but this time, she left things out of her report. She didn't mention the creatures that had probably taken the stuff, but she mentioned that there was proof that someone else had been present at every occasion. She left the report deliberately vague, and handed it in with a heavy heart. 

After, she didn't sleep for a week, and she was so sure that the guys from upstairs would come knocking at her door at any minute that her heart rate had doubled. But the innocent girl got off free, and her smile was stuck in Hermione's head for a month. 

Luna had smiled at her, and had said her report was much more believable than anything she could have written herself. 

"I'm too convinced I'm right," she had said. "Your doubts are saving my job, and a lot of lives. Thank you."

* * *

"Feel free to come in, it's just me!"

The voice that came from the other side of the door was vaguely familiar; it also definitely wasn't American, and Hermione's curiosity took over as she pushed open the door. 

"Luna?" she said, surprised, as she found a blonde woman hunched over a book.

"Hermione, welcome," Luna said, as if meeting a former classmate on the other side of the world was a perfectly normal occurrence. 

"What are you doing here? We all thought you were off searching the world for magical creatures."

Hermione put down her bag on an empty table at a side of the room, and took out her laptop. She didn't see a lot of electronics in the room, but she had seen a couple of computers upstairs, so she was pretty certain it should be able to function. Use of the internet could surely help with the rare cases she would be dealing with here. 

"Did that for a while," Luna replied, and she put down the book she had been reading. "But then I stumbled upon an investigation into a murder case. The only evidence they had of a murder were a couple of brains. It took me no more than a second to notice they were Aquavirius Maggots. That’s when I realised my expertise was more needed elsewhere."

* * *

"It's a fillafreemion."

Luna's voice sounded absolutely sure, and Hermione looked at her partner. She had long since outgrown the need to roll her eyes at everything Luna said, but that didn't mean she always believed her. The case was too young yet to say anything definitive about impossibilities being in play.

"A fillafreemion?" she replied. "Where do you see the evidence of that?"

Luna laid out a couple of pictures on the table, each one dated exactly 48 years apart. The scenes looked identical to the crime scene they were currently investigating, and curiosity got the better of Hermione as she poured over the images. A soft breeze seemed to be blowing in all of them, while the doors and windows in the rooms were closed. 

"Take them one by one," Luna said. "And it doesn't really show. But I've been looking over old case files for a long time, and I've noticed these. A fillafreemion is an air spirit. It sucks all the air out of a room, which accounts for why our victims all suffocated. When it leaves, it releases all the air back into the room, hence the breeze."

"48 years is a weird number, though," she continued. "They usually feed every fifty years. I think this one's ill. They rarely take air from occupied rooms, either. Fillafreemions are mostly peaceful creatures."

Hermione examined the pictures one by one, and compared them to the crime scene she had stored away in her brain. They did look eerily similar, and she felt a shiver run down her spine. 

"If this is the fillafreemion, is there anything we can do?"

Luna shook her head sadly. 

"I don't think we can cross over to their plane of existence. If this one is ill, it's going to need help from inside his own community. We can't help him."

"Or them," she added, as she pointed at the images she had laid out. "Almost 350 years of deaths and nothing we can do about it."

Hermione hesitated just a little bit, then stepped forward to hug her partner. 

"You can't save everyone," she whispered. "But everyone you do save is a victory."

* * *

"Your... expertise?" Hermione replied incredulously.

"My expertise," Luna confirmed, not even flinching at Hermione's disbelief. "The Bureau recruited me when I was still at Hogwarts, and after travelling for a while, I realised I had been wrong in rejecting them. So I took them up on their offer."

Hermione had to sit down at that, her head trying to sort itself out. Of course she had vaguely known that Luna was smart, she had been a Ravenclaw after all, but somehow her weirdness and airy nature had always seemed more prevalent than any actual intelligence. But she knew that the Bureau took one Ravenclaw student every year, and only one. To be picked for that was something of the highest honour a Hogwarts student could get, and the realisation that Luna had been selected was more of a shock than she wanted to admit. 

"They didn't like it when I started focussing on the cases that were a little out there, so after it became obvious I wouldn't give up, they relegated me to the basement. I'm giving these victims a voice, and they're not too keen on that."

Hermione frowned.

"Isn't that exactly what the Bureau wants as well?"

Luna shook her head sadly.

"Not when there are truths that they don't want to know. Or want to be made known."

* * *

The first time they left a courtroom in which Luna had been called to testify, Hermione was frustrated.

"Why do you always have to do that?" she called out the moment they had entered their own room at the Bureau again. She had started to think of it as a safe space, a haven of sorts where she could say whatever she wanted to say. Outside, she always had to work hard on projecting the right attitude - she needed to be supportive of her partner, but she also needed to be the scientific cynic who seemed to still be sane or their partnership would be broken.

"What do I do?" Luna asked, while she put away the evidence she had brought with her. 

"Ruin your chances of catching the guy!"

They had been working on a case in which some wizard had been manipulating time with ancient and dark magic, an art believed to be long gone. He used it to suck the life force out of unsuspecting wizards and witches who then appeared to have died of old age. The only reason the case had even been brought forth was because the guy had been interrupted during his last kill, and the witch he had been trying to suck dry had been able to identify him. When Luna had been called forth to testify, Hermione had figured she would just use this one case and that would be it; but Luna had brought every single case she had thought could be linked to this killer, and the court had all but laughed at her. The guy had walked.

"I shouldn't have to lie just to tell the truth," Luna said. 

"That's..." Out of pure habit, Hermione had started to contradict Luna, but she came to a still when she suddenly realised that that was a great golden rule to live by. 

Luna smiled at her, as if she could see the impact her words had had.

* * *

Hermione sighed, a weariness settling in her bones that she expected wouldn't go away for a very long time.

"The truth is just that, Luna," she said. "The truth. Of course the Bureau wants to find the perpetrators."

Luna shook her head, a small sigh escaping her that Hermione only hardly noticed. 

"The Bureau wants to send someone to trial, wants to make sure someone is found guilty," Luna corrected. "Unfortunately, that is not always the same thing."

Hermione opened up her laptop and started to organise her desk, anything to keep herself from losing it at her new partner. This was supposed to be her job? Trail along with Luna Lovegood and make sure she didn't say anything crazy? She had been the top student at Hogwarts, for heaven's sake! She deserved more than a babysitting job. 

"You'll see," Luna said, and she turned back to whatever she had been doing when Hermione came in. She hadn't seem perturbed in the slightest by Hermione's doubts and disbelief, even though she must know just as well as Hermione did why she had been sent down to the basement. 

"Well," Hermione thought as she set up her Bureau e-mail account (of course there were memos flying everywhere, and an owlery on the roof, but there was some overlap with the Muggle Bureau which required e-mail access), "I came here to get away from how my life had been. At the very least, this is going to be different."

* * *

Hermione hadn't meant for it to happen. She had meant to keep her feelings inside, to not let it interfere with her work. She was sure that if this came out, she would be yanked from this assignment before she could even ask to stay. Someone else would take her place, some new new recruit who would never believe Luna, who would ridicule her and laugh at her theories and...

"Breathe," Luna whispered, her mouth so dangerously close to Hermione's lips that it was short-circuiting her brain. 

She wasn't sure when leaving things out of her reports had turned to giving Luna the benefit of the doubt had turned to actively defending Luna to anyone who dared ridicule her. She still didn't believe everything the other girl said (she would always maintain that the Crumple-Horned Snorkack was a figment of the imagination, not some actual Swedish creature - but then again, she'd never been to Sweden, so what did she know?), but she never outright dismissed her ideas anymore. 

Hermione pulled away from Luna, just a tiny bit, not because she wanted to, but because if this came out she would be reassigned and Luna would have no one to defend her anymore. 

"Stop thinking," Luna whispered, still in that low voice, and she brought her lips closer again. 

Hermione knew she was probably waiting for her to take that final step, to close the distance and forever change the dynamics between them, but she was scared. If her supervisors learned about this and she'd be taken away, how would she survive in the harsh world up there? Where the monsters were all so very human and everyone would be suspicious of the partner of Loony Lovegood?

"I love you," Luna finally whispered, and that was an invitation, a surge of feeling rising inside Hermione, that she could not ignore. Love came easy to Luna it seemed, and while she wasn't sure she could reciprocate just yet, she was definitely feeling something, some things that she had never felt before, and she let their lips touch. 

Their kiss was light and soft, nothing like the scorching hot kisses the guilty pleasure romances on her nightstand described, but for that all the better. It was all so purely _Luna_ \- earnest, and loving, and so very, very precious.


End file.
